2013 AFA Pacific Air & Space Symposium

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General Shelton: George, thank you for that kind introduction. It's great to be here. And thanks to AFA for hosting this event again. By the way, I think the focus on the Pacific this year is absolutely appropriate. George mentioned the pivot to the Pacific, pirouette, whatever we want to call it. Clearly we have a shift to the Pacific that we're thinking about and I'll talk a little bit more about that.

I'm probably one of the few speakers, maybe the only speaker, who won't talk about the budget today. That's because I am sick of talking about the budget. In fact I'm tired of thinking about it, tired of living it. If you really want to talk about it we can certainly talk about it in the Q&A but in my prepared remarks I'm not going to discuss the budget.

The video clip you saw, Gravity and also a clip from Live Free or Die Hard, and I thank the studios for allowing us to use those, but it shows I think the importance of situational awareness certainly in the space and cyberspace domain, and I'll be talking quite a bit more about that. But it goes without saying that you can't act upon what you don't know about, so we'll have a lot more to say about that.

Air Force Space Command, as George said, has the organize, train and equip responsibilities for both space and cyberspace, and clearly these are areas where we have a heavy dependence in modern warfighting. In fact Secretary Hagel just recently talked about space and cyber in the context of the upcoming Quadrennial Defense Review and how he believes that we will have to continue to invest in these capabilities regardless of the size of the force that we see coming due to reductions that are coming up.

We're clearly being challenged in both domains. In 12-plus years of continuous combat, and if you really want to give the Air Force specific credit, we then had it for 10 years before that in Northern Watch and Southern Watch. So roughly 22 and a half years of continuous combat. Our adversaries have had a learning laboratory opportunity on us. They can certainly go to school on the things that we've been doing.

So as a result of that there are rapidly developing threats in both space and cyberspace. Some are very obvious and some are very insidious and we'll talk about both of those.

But I want to talk about cyber first, and then we'll talk about the space domain after that.

A little short trip down Memory Lane. There are probably a lot in this audience that don't remember this. I'm old enough that I do remember this. When there weren't desk-top computers on every desk. In fact the first desk-top computers that got on our desks were there principally for word processing. That's all we used them for. Individual word processors, if you will, at your desk.

Then we figured out how to network all those computers within a given building. Then we figured out how to network the buildings on the base. And eventually that grew out to a MAJCOM capability. But it ended up being MAJCOM by MAJCOM.

So as you might imagine, the comm officer on your base became a very popular guy. And the more talented that comm officer was on your base, the better your network was on your base. But as a result, we ended up depending on the individual talents of these people. So we ended up with what could only be described as really kind of a patchwork quilt in cyber capability across our Air Force. No real standards. No configuration control. And finally we decided that we had advanced far enough in the cyber business that we needed to do something about it.

So in the Air Force we stood up the first Network Operations Capability at Barksdale Air Force Base.

We can be very critical on where we are in cyber, but if you think back, that's not that long ago that we stood the capability up at Barksdale.

Very nascent situational awareness capability. Authorities not really fully embraced across the entire Air Force. In fact many of us remember times when cyber orders went out and they were largely ignored by wing commanders because they had other things to do. They weren't taken in the context of a legitimate order.

So fast forward to today. Major General Kevin McLaughlin and his team at 24th Air Force are doing an exceptional job of operating and defending our network.

Lance Lord is here today, General Lance Lord. And I'm going to use one of his sayings. He says that, in the context of 24th Air Force, they are certainly defending against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and many of them are domestic.

So let me tell you what I'm talking about.

We have what I would call an epidemic problem right now with people sending emails from the dot.mil domain to the dot.com domain with personally identifiable information. Why am I so excited about that? Certainly it's a privacy violation. It's really a violation of the Privacy Act. But maybe more importantly, should that information get intercepted it can be used by adversaries to target individual users, gain their credentials, and then have access to our networks. …

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